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While gaps between achievement of black and white students are not new, the study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that Ohio’s black children fared particularly poorly compared with the rest of the country. In addition, data from the Ohio Department of Education shows the problem of achievement gaps stretches across every corner of the state.

Ohio’s black children face a “dire situation” that won’t be corrected until leaders begin an open and honest discussion about race and obstacles to success, according to a national study released this month.

While gaps between achievement of black and white students are not new, the study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that Ohio’s black children fared particularly poorly compared with the rest of the country. In addition, data from the Ohio Department of Education shows the problem of achievement gaps stretches across every corner of the state.

In Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati or even Lancaster, the performance of white students on the state’s standardized tests far exceeded that of their black counterparts. It was particularly glaring in some districts.

For example, in Kenston Local Schools in Geauga County outside Cleveland, 93.9 percent of white students passed their math exams. Less than 56 percent of the district’s black students did the same.

Ohio’s new school report cards give a look into the successes of each of the district’s subgroups, divided by race, ethnicity, economic status and other factors. Each district gets a score for every subgroup with at least 30 students; groups with only a few students in them in a district are not scored separately.

Of the 189 schools that reported scores for black and white students, 65 percent had at least 10 percentage points more of their white students pass their reading exams than black students. For math, that 10-point gap was present in 88 percent of the districts.

The gap is more staggering in the aggregate. To get full credit toward their report cards, districts needed 84.3 percent of each demographic to pass the reading exam and 78.5 percent of each demographic to pass the math exam.

Across the state, 82 percent of schools met the reading mark for their white students, whereas 18 percent of districts met it for their black students. Math was even worse: 74 percent met it for white students and only 6.7 percent met it for black students.

“It’s incredible how these contrasts show up on every indicator,” said Dawn Wallace-Pascoe, project manager with Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, a group that partnered with the Casey Foundation. “It’s pretty dire.”

She noted that the report gave black children in Ohio the sixth-lowest score in the country, comparing everything from birth weight to proficiency scores.

Struggles and success

Lancaster City School District sits in predominantly white Fairfield County, and the gaps between white and black proficiency in the district are some of the largest in the state.

Less than 60 percent of its black students passed the reading test compared with 87 percent of its white students. In math, the gap was slightly smaller because fewer white students passed.

Steve Wigton, district superintendent, said he was unsure why blacks were scoring lower than whites in his schools. He said there is a correlation between poverty level and academic success but said there are no simple solutions. In both reading and math, a higher percentage of Lancaster’s economically disadvantaged students passed their tests than the district’s black students.

“We’re certainly cognizant of it,” Wigton said. “We work to improve our scores with minorities as we do with the other subgroups.”

He said the state breakdowns of scores for subgroups help draw attention to them and help highlight areas the district can improve.

Hollie Saunders, a former school board member and an organizer of the city’s Black Interest Group, said the numbers weren’t surprising to her. She blamed it on what she saw as a failure to prioritize reading skills in the local black community.

“I try to explain to them: Reading is your basic foundation of learning. If you can’t read, you can’t understand anything else,” she said. “I just don’t see that being valued.”

But not all districts experienced such an achievement gap, even those with predominantly white populations. At Madison Local Schools in Richland County, more than 89 percent of black students passed their reading test compared with nearly 87 percent of white students — one of four districts to have a higher percentage of blacks pass the exams. In math, white students had a slightly higher percentage of passing, but both groups exceeded the state’s success cutoff.

Lynn Meister, coordinator for curriculum, assessment and school improvement at Madison, said that, during the past five years, the district has begun stressing the importance of differentiation — aligning lessons to each student.

“The focus is on the individual student, making sure everyone has an equal opportunity to learn,” she said.

Superintendent Lee Kaple said the success of his district has been built over five years and warned against anyone thinking there was a quick or simple solution to such deep problems. He said districts need to provide stability and continuity to let staff and students grow.

“Find a program you believe in and get buy-in from all of your people: teachers, administrators, parents and the community,” he said. “Buy into the program and stick with it.”

Bridging the gap

The path to solving achievement gaps among any groups, including blacks and whites, will take some substantial changes, said Ohio Sen. Eric Kearney, D-Cincinnati.

Kearney, who sits on the senate education committee, said that, though he doesn’t outright disagree with setting strict standards, such as the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, the state must provide the resources schools need to offer programs to assist students in need.

Specifically, he said, the state needs to do more to ensure early-childhood education and getting students ready to learn. For example, if a child would qualify for a free or reduced lunch, he or she should automatically qualify for an all-day preschool program.

“That would work for all of Ohio’s children,” he said.

Kearney also said the school year must last longer, which he said would help Ohio students compete globally with kids from countries that have full-year learning as well as help minimize education gaps in racial or economic subgroups.

He said research has found that poor and wealthy students learn at basically the same rate during the school year, but wealthier students don’t see a drop over the summer because their parents can afford education programs or other enrichment activities.

Saunders, of Lancaster, said encouraging black students to read could be as simple as exposing them to more black writers. She said minority students might be more interested to read Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison or Alex Haley than Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Most importantly, she said, districts need to be creative in ways to engage black students. For example, the Lancaster district could have an event to highlight black authors in February to take advantage of Black History Month.

Wallace-Pascoe said her group’s hope by releasing the study was to spur conversation — “sounding an alarm” specifically — to force people to really think about ways to address the racial achievement divide.

“Having conversations about race is always uncomfortable,” she said. “(But) they need to take place when making decisions about students. What can we do to help those children that are so far behind to catch up?”